


The land of wolves

by jspringsteen



Series: The Company of Wolves [3]
Category: Sicario (Movies)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-12
Updated: 2020-07-12
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:54:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25226395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jspringsteen/pseuds/jspringsteen
Summary: Love has always been a foreign country to her, one where she’s been a tourist at times, but never long enough to really understand its inhabitants, its traditions, its laws and rules. And now she wonders, why should I settle for permanent residence in that unknown place at all, when there is the thrill of being chased to within the vicinity of its borders? Yes, it makes her scared, makes her heart race to see somebody zeroing in on her like he has, but flattered, too. He is the one person who has ever seen her for who she is.Alejandro comes back for Kate.
Relationships: Alejandro Gillick & Kate Macer, Alejandro Gillick/Kate Macer
Series: The Company of Wolves [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1537486
Comments: 11
Kudos: 26





	The land of wolves

_"Now I see that love is selfish. It makes you a country of two. At war with the rest of the world.’"_

Henrik Ibsen, _Rosmersholm_

*

Friday afternoon, 5:06 p.m. Kate is cleaning her bathtub. It’s mainly to keep her hands busy in a way that doesn’t involve smoking cigarette after cigarette, and it could use a good scrub, anyway. Especially given who’s coming by tonight.

“I’m putting an end to it,” he’d said when he called her up yesterday. She didn’t need to ask him for specifics; she knew what he was talking about, and her heart had ballooned in her chest.

“Let’s talk. I’ll take you out.”

She didn’t know where he was calling from—imagined him in a phone booth in a deserted parking lot underneath the flickering neon letters of a 24-hour grocery store (very _Paris, Texas_ ) or in a dingy hotel room, talking on a throwaway cell phone and looking up at a ceiling marbled brown by water stains. Foolish romantic ideas; what she thought criminals were like when she was twelve and watching old movies on TV. _The Sting, North by Northwest, Dial M for Murder_. Her line of work reduced to a smoking gun on a desk, a bloody footstep on a carpet, a fedora hung on a coat stand. Not rotting corpses in the walls of a house, decapitated bodies hanging from an overpass, or shop owners bashed to death with baseball bats by young men determined to debunk that founding American myth—that crime doesn’t pay.

Coming home after a busy day at work, grateful for the distraction it provided, she sinks down on the couch, feeling somehow tired and jittery at the same time. She returns to their conversation again and again, and, in her paranoia, half convinces herself that he might have meant that other connotation of ‘taking someone out’ – he’s going to kill her, for real this time. The idea is like a stone sticking up from the sidewalk, one her thoughts trip up on time and again, even though she knows better now. Yes, she’d once convinced herself he was a merciless killer, one set upon destroying her life. Well, he is—meaning, he has killed, and without mercy, no doubt—and he has—meaning, he has torn it up from the very roots, and she has let him—but it’s all so much more complicated than that. He’s abused her, threatened her, shot her in the chest… but also saved her life, come to her for help, opened her eyes as to the life she was really leading, mindlessly carrying out orders. Made her see her potential, her worth. She used to think him sparing her life was a cruelty, but now she knows it was an act of care.

As it is, they really barely know each other. _But maybe it’s possible to care more about somebody than you actually know them_ , she thinks, shivering with nervous pleasure at the thought of seeing him, feeling him, smelling him. Now comes the moment when the masks they’ve put on each other slip off and they have to reconcile them with the real, multifaceted, irrational human beings underneath. If she doesn’t like what she sees, well, at least she’ll have clarity. But what if she does like it? What if it makes her hungry for more, drawing her in like a black hole? She has no idea what will happen tonight, or afterwards. She simultaneously hopes he will disappear from her life, and doesn’t; expects him to ask her to run away with him, and balks at the very idea. She goes into the bathroom with a vague idea of either popping two Valiums or putting a razor to her wrists out of sheer desire for any kind of relief. She takes up bleach and a cleaning rag instead.

When she finishes, there’s still fifteen minutes to go before his ETA. She goes into the bedroom and opens her closet, eyeing the items hanging there with distaste. She sees now what Reggie used to see – the white bras and panties, greying after countless careless wash cycles; grey and white T-shirts; two pairs of jeans; a few neutral tops. Then, hidden away at the back, she spies a black dress she once wore to an FBI gala and felt intensely uncomfortable in all night. She doesn’t even remember bringing it with her to Harlingen—she thought she’d got rid of it. She’s glad now that she hasn’t. She doesn’t know where he’s taking her or what he’ll be wearing, but it seems a pretty safe bet. The least she can do is try it on.

When she looks in the mirror, she sees a stranger’s drawn, pale face superimposed onto her own body from way back when. It’s a flattering dress, it has to be said. She remembers Reggie saying, on seeing her in it, that if he hadn’t seen her blow a guy’s head off last week he might have made a move on her. She’d laughed it off, uncomfortable, even as it confirmed her belief that guys, her newly ex-husband included, felt intimidated by her, and would prefer to be with a softer, prettier woman. It makes her smile wryly now. Reggie always thought he knew what was best for her. What would he say if he could see her now?

She decides to keep the dress on, and hurries to the bathroom to put on mascara. Her hand trembles so much that after doing one eye, she has to go into the kitchen for a shot of whiskey before she can continue with a more steady hand. _I’m no good at this,_ she thinks, looking in the mirror while grappling with her hair. She only knows two ways to wear it, up or down. She decides to leave it down. She looks vainly for a bottle of perfume she thought she had lying around somewhere.

At six o’clock on the dot, the doorbell goes. Feeling her intestines twist in on each other like rattlesnakes, Kate takes one last look at the stranger in the mirror, turns out the light, takes a deep breath and opens the door.

The wounds on his cheeks have healed; all that’s left are scars, and they look like dimples when he smiles. _Christ—how is it that he even wears a near death experience well?_ His clothes are nondescript, as always: brown chinos, a light-blue shirt, a sand-coloured blazer. Still, he could never blend into a crowd completely—not with those eyes, which have a glow all of their own, like a predator’s looking out through them. A thing soft-spoken but feral, and cold. Except now. Except when he’s with her.

“Kate.” The admiration he puts into that one syllable gives her goosebumps, and she asks herself once again how she could have ever thought of herself as a strong person, given the power his voice has over her.

“Hi,” she says shyly.

He steps closer and reaches out to cup her elbows, pulling her towards him. His eyes roam her face, then he bends down to kiss her bare shoulder. She shivers.

“You look beautiful,” he says, softly, a toothless wolf.

“Thank you,” she manages. Her heart is pounding.

“Are you ready?”

She nods, and pulls the door closed behind her.

The Texas night is balmy. As she follows him towards a black Mercedes, she briefly looks up at the moon, imprisoned, from where she stands, behind a web of electrical cables. Alejandro opens the door for her with a smile. The car smells brand-new of leather and rubber. She doesn’t ask where he got it, or where he’s been for the past month. Tonight, she decides, they’re just a normal couple out on a date. Nothing suspicious about it. And so the only question she asks him when he steps behind the wheel is, “Where are we going?”

She’s been worried about running into her colleagues or neighbours, so she’s relieved when he says he’s taking her to a Japanese restaurant in Palm Valley, a good distance from Harlingen. Nobody she knows here would choose sushi over steak, pizza, or Mexican food, so she breathes a sigh of relief. He takes his eyes off the road briefly to look at her. “You approve?” She nods. “Sounds great.”

Her heart continues to beat quickly as Alejandro parks the car and they walk towards the entrance, where they’re greeted by a hostess in a black kimono. As she looks up their reservation, name of Daniel Sánchez plus one, Kate feels an irresistible desire to put her hand in the crook of Alejandro’s elbow. She indulges her whim, and he looks at her, surprised, but only for a second before he draws in his arm, keeping her hand snug against his warm body. The hostess looks up again, smiles at them both, and tells them to follow her.

Once seated, her nerves force her to look everywhere except at Alejandro. Eventually, when she feels she can avoid his eyes no longer, she looks at him to see an amused smirk on his face. She blushes.

“Sorry. I feel like a fish outta water,” she says. The smirk turns to a smile.

“Me too.”

“It’s weird,” she says, putting her elbows on the table and leaning forward _—not very ladylike, I know._ “Anyone who sees us here might think we met at a bar, or something. Or a party.”

When he doesn’t reply right away, she drops her smile as the implication of what she’s just said dawns on her. “You think we’re being watched?”

He reaches out to brush her forearm. “No. I don’t think so.” She chooses to believe him.

“I’m glad we’re here,” he says.

“Yeah,” Kate says. “Me too.” He keeps his hand on her arm, and she relaxes a little. Furtively, she looks around her, but nobody is looking at them. At least she _looks_ as if she belongs here.

She’s relieved when the waiter arrives. They order a bottle of wine and a round of appetizers.

“Have you ever been to Japan?” she asks him when the waiter has left. Alejandro shakes his head.

“Have you?”

“No.” There’s another silence, and she’s beginning to feel just plain awkward now. She’s relieved when he asks her to tell him about her family.

When she meets his eyes her mind stumbles, like before—like a veil is being lifted, momentarily, and the sense of imminent danger she’s used to feeling around him is back. He’s been living in her fantasies for so long, violent memories and hallucinations overlapping so that it’s become hard to tell them apart; she still finds it hard to tell what is real and what isn’t. The intensity of his gaze makes her feel like she’s being preyed upon. _The smile of an assassin_ , a voice in her head whispers to her. _The smile of a man who has killed children. The smile of a wolf._ But one blink of her eyes and the genuine warmth is back, and she chastises herself for being paranoid. _He promised me he was going to put an end to it._

So she tells him about her parents in Minnesota and about her brother, who is a lawyer in New York. She imagines bringing Alejandro home for Christmas as her new boyfriend. “Mom, dad, this is Alejandro. He used to work for the Medellín, but now he’s an assassin. We met when we tried to roll up a Mexican cartel and he shot me in the chest. But we didn’t get really serious until I helped him smuggle the kidnapped daughter of a cartel leader across the border. Some meet-cute, huh?”

They would think she’s lost her mind.

Well, hasn’t she?

Alejandro snaps her out of her reverie by asking her how she ended up working for the FBI, and their conversation segues into childhood dreams, failed forensic science entrance exams, and family pressure.

“I was a perfectionist,” she says. “It was a huge blow for me to not get into forensic science. It was all I’d dreamed of until then… But I still wanted to get into police work. You know me,” and she hears herself getting cynical, “ever the idealist.”

“Like me,” he says, catching her off guard with his candid tone. “It’s why I became a prosecutor. To catch criminals.”

She tries to imagine a young, unscarred Alejandro. “Until you started working for the criminals.”

He gives her a wry smile. “That depends on which side you’re on.”

He’s right, of course. There’s no glamour in crime, and no logic. When she was in the FBI they loved to spin it that way, and it was what she desperately wanted to believe when she got on board for Juaréz: justice served, plot lines neatly tied up, paperwork filled out and on to the next job. Some villain who could be brought to justice, rather than have it just be another incident in the litany of mindless cruelty that surrounds the cartels. But there had been no moral to this story, and certainly no satisfying resolution. Nothing more than a hard-learned lesson—how dangerous it is to believe in fairy tales. And how it is even more dangerous to try and uncover what mindless real-life horrors they’ve come to symbolise.

_So why are you still pretending this little fairy tale is real?_

_Because I truly believe that he can change._

_He can change, alright. From idealistic grade-A student to child killer._

Their food arrives, and after clinking their wine glasses together—she has purposefully chosen white, not the red that reminds her of her bloody dreams—they eat in silence. After a minute or two, Alejandro remarks, “This is very good.”

Kate nods, her mouth full of fish. She swallows and takes a sip of wine, studying Alejandro, whose eyes are focused on his food. She remembers him saying food didn’t taste the same after his daughter was killed; she wonders how it tastes to him now.

He picks up where they left off, asking her why she began working with hostages, and she replies: “Because I couldn’t just look away. I couldn’t just let it be numbers and facts on my screen or in a newspaper. I wanted to be there on the front line. To do something about it. I had to make it real, no matter how distasteful it was or how uncomfortable I felt.”

He gives her a smile as though her answer amuses him, but there is a note of admiration in his voice when he says, “You’re a passionate person. I wouldn’t have guessed that, at the beginning.”

He pours the last of the wine into his glass, swirls it around and sips it, all without meeting her eyes.

Then he says, “I’ve been wondering what you thought of me the first time we met.”

“I had no idea what to make of you,” Kate answers. “I was suspicious of you. You were a ghost, as far as I was concerned.” The wine making her bold, she adds daringly, “But I liked the suit.”

He nods earnestly. “It’s my favourite suit.”

His answer arrests her, revealing a previously unthought-of dimension to him. He must have favourite meals; movies he enjoys; books he likes to read. And he must have woken up that morning, facing a day of torturing and questioning, thinking, _I think I’ll wear my favourite suit today, for luck._ It defies her understanding; yet it makes him that much more human, too.

She knows what the next question should be, even though she doesn’t want to ask it.

“What’d you think of me?”

He chews thoughtfully for a moment or two. “There was something about you,” he replies. “I knew nothing about you, except you were unusual, and you were there because you’d been picked for the operation. But I recognized something in you… Well.” He waves his hand. “I know it sounds odd. But I sensed there was something different about you. That attracted me.” He wipes his mouth with a napkin, looking straight at her as he says the last words.

She feels her cheeks heat. She didn’t imagine it, then, the terrible link that was forged between them on the plane, before they even knew each other’s names.

“Did you know then what role Reggie and I were gonna play?” she asks him. She glances over at the couple at the table next to them, shielded from them by an elaborately carved mahogany frame. She needs to know, if she is to trust him.

He doesn’t answer immediately. “I did. I must admit I felt rather sorry for you. They told me you were the best in your field. And then things got so complicated.”

“Yeah. That was the end of that.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I know nothing I say can make it up to you.”

“Oh, I don’t want your pity,” she says, thinking to herself, _Liar, that’s exactly what you want._ She rests her chin in her hand, feeling sad, suddenly, as if in mourning for the person she used to be. “I just—” her voice wobbles dangerously. She hates her tears, how weak they make her seem. “I feel like I’m a completely different person from who I was then.”

He nods. “I know what that’s like.”

“Can you believe that those people—those idealists, top of our class, in happy relationships—they’re still in there somewhere? Would you recognise yourself if you talked to the you from ten years ago?”

He stares at her, his face grave. “No,” he says quietly. “I don’t believe that I would.”

A phone rings, startling them both. Alejandro immediately digs into his pocket and picks up his cellphone, answering without another word to her. He listens for a few tense seconds, his body angled away from Kate.

“ _Muy bien, cabrón,_ ” he says, then hangs up. He gives her a smile and turns back to his food. Kate has dropped her cutlery, distrust sprouting in her brain like weeds.

“Who was that?”

“That was Matt,” he says, “telling me the time and location for our rendezvous tomorrow.”

She nods. “I don’t suppose you can give me any more details than that, huh?” He shakes his head. _And I don’t even want to know,_ she thinks, stubbornly. _I deserve to enjoy this night with him, damn it, wearing this stupid dress, eating this stupid fancy food._

But it’s easier said than done. They eat in silence for a while. Under the table, Kate clenches her fist, pressing her nails sharply into her palm. She can’t stand the silence, the awkwardness of being simultaneously at the beginning and the end of something, making them strangers to each other once again. _Could we really be happy together?_ she wonders. Happy people can pretend they don't see what they're seeing, can substitute the images in front of their eyes with their own; it’s the only explanation. She’s had years of practice, conditioned to pretend not to see what was happening in front of her, to look away and think of something else. And the one time she dared to puncture the surface, to _really_ _look_ , it ended in tragedy. You’d think she’d learn—that like an animal, once bitten, she’d have enough sense not to risk the chance of pain again. It’d be easy, too. People have been telling her how to look for so long; it’s easy to keep up the pretense tonight.

And yet… she has the feeling that it’s possible. The images she substituted for him were somehow always worse than reality. And she knows, deep down, that if she is to trust him and his promise to come back, she needs to know more about him, and his life before Juaréz. She takes a deep breath, as if just before plunging into water.

“Do you remember the first time you killed someone?”

He looks at her, only mildly surprised by her question. “Of course. Don’t you?”

“I do.”

“Who was it?”

“You first.”

He sighs. “A court witness, for some drug case. When I worked for Medellín.”

“What’d he do?”

“He was going to lay out a false testimony that would put my client in prison for life. We couldn’t let that happen.” He looks at her, his head cocked, his smile a sad challenge. “What about you?”

Kate shrugs. “Mine was an armed robber. I never saw his face. I shot him in the back, and down he went.”

There is a fraught silence, broken when he says: “I wasn’t always like this, you know.”

“What were you like?” she asks, a flutter in her stomach, whether from tenderness or fear she doesn’t know. There is still so much of him that is mystery to her. Alejandro the father, the husband, the lawyer—it’s the respectable side of him that she yearns to learn more about.

“I was a top-of-the-class law student. Married young. Travelled a lot.”

She hesitates, then asks, “So how’d you get here?”

To her surprise, he doesn’t evade her question, like he’s done before. “A knock-on effect. Where I come from, it’s hard to find work that’s completely free from the influence of the cartels. So I figured, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. I was young, ambitious… I wanted the money, a good life for my family. But I didn’t realize that once you’re caught in their web, there’s no getting out.”

He sets his plate aside and plants his elbows on the table, tenting his fingers. “I did try. For my family. Rosa, my wife, she warned me that she’d leave me if I didn’t end it. She didn’t like how dangerous it was. But by then, it was too late… I was put on a case against the Sonora cartel, and well. You know the rest.”

A beat of silence. _Not that different from our situation,_ Kate reflects.

“What was she like?” she asks softly. “Rosa?”

He looks past her, but not at anything; it’s like his gaze is focusing inward. “I met her in law school,” he replies. “She was an attorney in Mexico City.” His answer stops there, and she says, hesitatingly, “If you don’t want to tell me… we can change the subject.”

“No.” He looks at her, fiercely, and she realizes he’s not putting himself through this pain for nothing. He wants to put his cards on the table; to demystify himself for her, lest she keep thinking of him as a monster standing guard over an old wound.

“It’s fine,” he says in a softer voice. “I’d like to tell you.”

He describes the house where they lived, their neighbourhood, then moves on to the birth of their daughter and her childhood. Kate listens, resting her chin on her hands. She thought it might be too painful for him to talk about it, but the years seem to drop from him as he talks animatedly. Before her, a headstrong, smart woman comes to life, one who condemned her husband’s morals when it came to his work but nevertheless stood by him, knowing that when faced with the choice to poke out your own eyes to live safely and comfortably under a corrupt regime, or stand up to them and have them do it for you, the former will hurt the least. It’s an unenviable decision, but understandable; not everyone wants to be a part of history. Some people just want to stay alive. A woman who bore it bravely when she had a deaf child, knowing life would be so much harder on her daughter than it needed to be.

“What do you miss about her?” Kate asks. She wonders idly if he’s ever told anyone all this, even Matt.

“Everything,” he says. “Her laughter. Her cooking. We used to dance in the kitchen…” He falls silent, and looks down at his plate. A look of pain crosses his face.

“She died in the kitchen,” he says quietly. “Shot in the head.”

Kate holds her breath. “And your daughter?”

“Julieta. They slit her throat… while she was lying in bed. I was out of the house, on a business trip.” His voice is his usual quiet monotone, but she knows by now his monotone can cover a wealth of emotions. 

“I couldn’t even do anything to help them, defend them. I couldn’t say goodbye. I found them when I came home.” His voice has changed while dipping into his memories; she doesn’t like this cold tone, the one that reminds her to think of him as a wolf.

“I’m sorry,” Kate says; she wants to reach out and touch his arm, but it seems incongruous somehow. _What else do you say? Especially if you’re one of the pieces of debris floating along in the wake of this event?_

“And when I met Matt, he told me he could help me. I could be useful, restore the balance, even as I pursued my revenge. It would be two birds with one stone.” He looks at her. “You see, Kate, I thought like you once. Like I was the protagonist in a story. But we’re not. There’s no moral, no reason for murder, or rape, or child killing, not in that world, beyond sending a message. Everyone there lives in fear. It’s just how it is. Ending a life is the easiest thing in the world once you learn that blood is a currency. You learn to accept it.”

“It didn’t give you pleasure?”

“It’s never given me any pleasure.”

“Not even when you killed the man who killed your family.”

He looks at her with a sombre expression. “That’s not pleasure. It’s gratification, if anything. It had to be done.”

“What about money?”

He shrugs. They sit in forced silence when the waiter sidles up to refill their wine glasses. When he’s gone, Alejandro asks: “You were married before too, no?”

Kate sighs. “Yep.”

“What happened?”

She shrugs. “There’s not much to tell. He was a vet. And a part-time saint. He once stopped the car on a road trip because he saw a wounded coyote lying by the side of the road. He nursed it back to life, then and there.” She watches for the effect her words have on him, but his face remains neutral.

“Yet you divorced him,” he says.

“I did. We were high school sweethearts, and we just... grew apart.”

He rubs the back of her hand with his thumb, and she can see him imagining her, younger, in a white rather than a black dress. Back then she thought love—and marriage, its natural extension—would smooth out any and all difficulties, be an unlimited source of happiness. She smiles wryly to think of her dumb innocence. Love has always been a foreign country to her, one where she’s been a tourist at times, but never long enough to really understand its inhabitants, its traditions, its laws and rules. And now she wonders, why should I settle for permanent residence in that unknown place at all, when there is the thrill of being chased to within the vicinity of its borders? Yes, it makes her scared, makes her heart race to see somebody zeroing in on her like he has, but flattered, too. He is the one person who has ever seen her for who she is.

He studies her, and something sly creeps into his manner when he says, “He couldn’t understand why you were in love with your job, and he couldn’t handle coming in second place. Maybe he thought you were morbid, obsessive. Couldn’t understand why you’d choose to be around criminals and dead bodies.”

Her wineglass freezes in the air on the way to her mouth _. His wife must’ve told him something similar_ , she thinks. It’s true; these questions, which she’s asked herself countless times since Juaréz—she always hears them in Chris’s voice.

He always used to say he hated to see how hard she’d become. He’d been right; you can’t be in an environment like that and not adopt some element of the cruelty you see around you, simply to get through the day. It was always a virtue to her. On each new assignment there was always something more distasteful, more uncomfortable around the corner. It became almost a challenge to her, to see how much she could take, how much resistance she could build up within herself. And when the time came, it made it easier to leave him, too.

“He didn’t see how special you were,” he says, and she blushes.

“It’s hard being with a person who doesn’t understand you,” she admits.

His grip on her hand tightens slightly. “But we don’t need to hide from each other,” Alejandro says. “You were right that night when you said I wanted you to be like me. I wanted to confirm what I suspected from the start—that we are more like each other than we’re like other people. Perhaps I even wanted to _make_ you like me.” He lowers his eyes. “I wanted you to come to me because you wanted to, not because you were afraid. It doesn’t absolve me, I know.”

He looks her in the eyes. “I will come back for you, Kate. I will put an end to it. And I’ll make sure nobody lays a finger on you again.”

“What changed?” she asks. “The last time we spoke, you couldn’t make that promise.”

“I changed. You changed me. You treated me like no one else before. In all these years, I haven’t known even one person like myself. I gave up long ago, and accepted my solitude. But now… You brought me back to life, in more ways than one.”

She looks down at her empty plate, caught by the intensity behind his eyes.

“In all those years. Has there never been anyone…?”

He shakes his head. “I haven’t really been with anyone since she died. It always felt like cheating.”

She wills him to look up and catch her eye.

“And now?”

He hesitates, then says, “Before I met you, all I wanted was revenge for what happened. That was all I cared about. How to get there. How to do it. That’s what I spent my days thinking about. But the morning after I killed Alarcón… I woke up thinking about you.”

She holds her breath.

“And I haven’t stopped since,” he says.

She squeezes his hands. “Do you really mean that?”

He nods.

She feels as if a pebble has been dropped inside her, ripples of fire coursing through her nervous system.

He beckons the waiter to settle the check. While they wait for him to return with the change, Alejandro rises and comes to stand behind her. Kate shivers; she suddenly feels cold, and wants her coat. She feels him lay his hands on her bare shoulders, and rub them slowly. She turns her head to look up at him, and sees his grave, scarred face looking down at her. He leans in to kiss her.

 _Nothing unusual to see here,_ she thinks. _Just a wealthy businessman and his girlfriend enjoying a night out. If only people knew what we are. What we’ve seen and done._ It baffles her to think how thin, yet how opaque, the surface can be. And, for that matter, what does she know of these people? They might have committed tax fraud. Be addicted to painkillers. Beat each other when they get home, or cheat on each other when they get the chance.

No matter how badly she wanted to pretend, she can’t fool herself. He is the only real thing here.

He rests his hand on the small of her back as they walk out and towards the car. She likes how he touches her, confirming their attachment, which for so long she thought she’d imagined. Yet his fingers trigger her, make her stumble over that stone in her memory again; she has a sudden vision of as his hostage, the pressure on her back from a gun in his hand. It only lasts a second; she shivers, and pretends it’s from the cold.

They drive home in near silence. Alejandro has placed his hand on her bare knee; she fears another flash of PTSD, but the heat radiating from his touch calms and arouses her at the same time. It seems to convey everything hanging in the air between them. Possession. Desire. Reassurance. Love.

He parks the car, kills the engine, and they sit in silence for a while, in the dark.

Kate says, “I feel like I’m sixteen again and you’ve just driven me home from prom.” He chuckles, something she’s never heard him do before. It’s a nice sound.

“Like my father’s gonna come out any minute to ask what’s taking so long.”

The smile lingers on his face as he turns and looks at her. The street lantern paints the right side of his face yellow, lighting up one green eye. He leans in and kisses her, briefly, then leans back again.

Fear flashes up inside her; _that was it, then. Now he’s gonna drive off into the night._

But he shows no signs of wanting to move; he simply unhooks his seatbelt so he can twist his body towards hers. He kisses her again, and wraps his arms around her.

Once planted, her fear proves difficult to root out; even as they kiss, she feels afraid that if she moves he’ll be gone, again. Out in the desert, again. In the emergency room, again. Gone as if up in smoke, again. His hold tightens ever so slightly, as if he can hear her thoughts.

The thought that they might have been followed, or spied on, painting a new target on her back, elbows its way in again. Somebody might be watching them right now. _You’re being paranoid,_ she thinks. _It’s too late now, anyway._ All the same, she can’t continue to kiss him with the same reckless abandon, and breaks it off.

“Do you want to come up?” she asks him.

“Yes.”

As he follows her up the stairs and into her apartment, she says, “That’s the first time I’ve actually invited you into my house.” He makes a sound that might be a chuckle. _It’s the nerves,_ she thinks. _Gotta stop making jokes when I’m nervous._

He notices the yellow plastic gloves and the bottle of chlorine she’s left on the kitchen counter.

“What’d you do—get rid of a body?”

She frowns at him, caught off guard. “I cleaned the bathroom. Why would there be a body—”

“It was a joke,” he says with a smile. She laughs, nervously. So they both make awkward jokes when they’re nervous—that’s one new thing she’s learned already.

_Do you know the one about the grown woman who fell in love with a professional murderer? It’s really funny._

She closes the curtains and turns the lights down low. For safety, she tells herself, preventing people outside from looking in and seeing their silhouetted figures. There is, of course, a more logical explanation—that she craves the safety of the half-dark for themselves, allowing them both to be anything but what they really are.

Alejandro has taken off his jacket and hung it over a chair; he stands in the middle of the living room, a little forlornly. She feels a twinge of sympathy in her heart, and goes to him.

He raises his hand and tips up her chin with his fingers, leaning in to kiss her. The warm nearness of him, his smell—expensive—and the shivers his hands leave as he pulls her closer to him intoxicate her. He’s alive, he’s here, and this time, there’s nothing to stand in their way. She takes his hand and breaks off the kiss to lead him into the bedroom. She closes the door behind them, and the mingling of their shallow breathing becomes the only sound.

She kisses him again, or he kisses her, it doesn’t matter, they come at each other with equal force. But there’s none of the frenzied tearing and scratching she used to dream about. He lifts her T-shirt slowly over her head, tickling her sides; she undoes the buttons of his shirt one by one, running her hands over the warm, bare skin underneath. Pants drop to the ground, followed by underwear. He unhooks her bra but keeps his hands safely on her hips as they kiss. She feels not only his hunger, but his restraint and his loneliness—senses he’s holding himself back from touching her the way he wants to. He has been alone for so long, so impossibly long, her own loneliness seems insignificant beside it. If he is like this, she thinks, he’s not a wolf – he isn’t any sort of mindless animal, one who gains pleasure from the violence he inflicts on others. I knew it that evening he forced me to sign the agreement. It’s not his violence that’s going to undo me.

It’s violence she’s tired of. He seems to be, too. She thought this first time she would be on her knees like a sheep, idly grazing, and that he’d take her from behind, his claws sinking into her sides, his teeth on her neck, his jaw slavering, forcing entry inside her where she expected him to, where she was already wet and soft, and to be undergoing it with her face buried in her hands in shame. But he pushes her down on her back onto the bed, gently, his eyes never leaving the contours of her face that the moonlight, coming faintly through the closed window shade, draws out. She frames his face with her hands, and he turns his head to kiss her hand, his breath hot and wet on her palm. She reaches down to stroke him and he moans into her mouth. She welcomes him in, and cries out when he enters her.

He buries his face in her neck as he moves, her hands are on his back and she feels the muscles and his ribs moving under the skin, the jerking movements of a wolf feasting on his kill, a thin film of sweat beginning to form. She hopes her body makes him feel as safe as he makes her feel. She’s never had a man move so slowly and tenderly inside her, as if he’s trying to stretch time into one never-ending moment where he might find a semblance of peace. She thinks of that old expression for sex, _making the beast with two backs._ Creating an animal that’s neither sheep, nor wolf, nor human, but something else entirely; it seems to her that’s exactly what they’re doing.

At one point he moves up to look at her again, and his face looks the way it did when he was drugged, after his hospital visit—just slightly smoother and softer than it normally is, though she knows he is already very good at keeping any worry or anxiety from showing. She smiles at him, and he smiles back, and leans in to give her a kiss.

After a few more minutes he pulls out of her, and a few seconds later she feels wetness on her inner thigh, cooling quickly. He wipes it off with a corner of the bedspread, then turns away and swings his legs off the edge of the bed. Disappointment and anguish knife through the vapours in her dazed, contented brain, but he simply turns on her reading light and turns back around to look at her.

“I want to see you,” he says softly. She feels vulnerable under his gaze, naked and pinned down, but then she remembers that she can look, too. She’s seen him half-naked before, of course, but only in the clinical light of the ER; and after what he’s told her tonight, is that really nakedness? She reaches out to touch the scar of the stabbing, then lays her hand on one scarred cheek. She pulls him towards her and kisses him.

His left hand slips down her cheek to her throat, to her breast, which he cups; he runs his thumb over her nipple, and pinches it before continuing down, his hand, cruel in its slow teasing, gently skimming the insides of her legs to ease them apart again. She waits, trembling, for his touch, and when it comes she breaks their kiss abruptly when her back arches of its own accord, her head thrown back, her mouth open with pleasure she can’t express. She collapses and lies immobile as he touches her, and finds herself drifting away—she’s on her back staring at the ceiling of the tunnel in Nogales, thinks of those fingers on the trigger of the gun that fired the shot, those same fingers that are now trying to knock her down again, trying to hit a bullseye, and it turns her on even more, oh God, _why,_ there’s so much blood on those fingers that are now coated with—

He moves to kiss below her ear instead, then down her throat as his thumb circles round and round, then his hand stills. She protests with a whimper; but he moves to spread her legs and kneel between them. He kisses his way down her chest, her stomach, seeming to draw all her blood away from her head and upper body to the throbbing spot between her legs, and hooks her knees over his shoulders, and she closes her eyes as he eats her up like the hungry, hungry wolf she knows him to be.

Afterwards, he wraps his arms around her and rests his face against her neck. They are as close as two people can be, but each one in their own world. She wonders if he’s thinking about his wife. The soft rhythm of his heartbeat pressing into her back reminds her how alive they are, despite everything, despite having been bound together by death, or rather the same possibility of giving each other death, each one life for the other. Not death—mortality.

She allows herself, for a moment, to close her eyes and focus on the feeling of his warm skin against hers, his steady breathing, and let herself be happy. It’s more than a feeling of relief from built-up tension being released, or simply post-orgasmic bliss. It’s a feeling that this is right, that she’s right where she should be, secure in the knowledge that there’s somebody who wants to be with her, _really_ wants to be with her—someone who sees her for who she truly is.

His breathing steadies. She idly wonders if he’ll have nightmares tonight, but he seems to be sleeping the sleep of the innocent. Sleeping, he is at his most vulnerable. In the fairy tale, she remembers, the wolf is asleep when the woodsman comes and cuts open his stomach with an axe, letting the grandmother and the child escape unscathed. Letting the innocent and the vulnerable out. She know now that she’ll find the same thing if she cuts him open.

Her fingers are itching to be lighting up a cigarette, so she carefully unravels from his embrace and puts on her robe. Taking her Marlboros, she steps into the living room and slides the balcony door open. The almost-full moon stares her down as she lights up and gratefully welcomes the smoke into her lungs.

She looks down into the parking lot as she smokes. She’ll never be able to stand on a balcony again without hearing him say she shouldn’t; nor will she ever shake the suspicion that somebody’s watching her, or somehow manipulating her from afar. But at least it will no longer be by him. He was only ever an instrument; and besides, weren’t his attempts to get into her head more than manipulation—explorations, rather, to see whether her brain functioned just like his? He, too, from a young age has felt the need to do something against injustice, whether personal or collective; to take action, rather than sit back passively, and chase a relief and fulfillment that will never come. It’s an aspect of him she recognizes and respects—even if the blood of children is still drying on his hands.

She can’t account for it, how safe he can make her feel, has made her feel all night—and how like running the next, like right now, when she remembers who he is and what he has done. She feels foolish for how hard she tried to keep up the illusion tonight. She stares out at the cars crawling along the highway like lightning bugs through the dark.

She tenses when she hears movement behind her. Alejandro has put on his pants (and his gun holster, she notices) and has followed her outside. He snakes one arm around her waist and says, “You shouldn’t smoke so much.”

She rolls her eyes, and can just stop herself from answering mockingly, “Yes, _dad_ ”. Instead, she laughs a plume of white into the night. “Right.”

Paranoia creeps up on her again. What if he doesn’t keep his promise to come back for her? He senses she’s unable to relax into his touch and takes his arm away again. She wraps her own around her waist to take its place while he leans his elbows on the edge of the balcony.

She can feel him looking sideways at her. “What are you going to do now? Push me away?” His voice is teasing, mixed with the curiosity new lovers have for their partners’ personal quirks. 

She gives him a look of mock annoyance. “Shall I? Yes, I think I will. Go away.”

He smiles, not believing her any more than she wants to be believed. He holds her gaze.

“It was good,” he says, quietly. “Just now.”

She nods, and blows out smoke. He’s feeling what she feels, then—that it feels right, and that they’re saying goodbye to something they’ve never even had the chance to plumb the depths of, because it would be life. Threatened life. Precarious life. But still— _their_ life.

But only for a while. Only until he comes back.

“Doesn’t it eat away at you?” she asks. “The ‘what if’?”

He looks at her. “’What if’…?”

“What if we’d met under ordinary circumstances? What if we could have a normal life together, without having to look over our shoulders constantly? That ‘what if’.” She is silent for a moment, looks at the shower of sparks when she taps her cigarette on the fence. “Because I think about it all the time.”

He doesn’t respond right away. “I don’t entertain hypotheticals,” he says. His rational lawyer’s mind again. “It could not have happened differently than it has.”

“I guess that’s true.”

She pauses.

“How long do you think it’ll be before you come back?”

He shrugs. “It depends. I think it’ll take a while before things have blown over. I want to make sure you’re safe, too. And your colleagues, your family.”

“And what’s gonna happen next?”

She looks up to see a look of uncertainty cross his face, briefly. For the first time, he doesn’t have a war to fight. This is unfamiliar territory to him, too.

“I’d find safe houses where we could live,” he says. “We’d have to vanish—it wouldn’t be easy, but it could be done.”

“What, and live like a prisoner?” she says. “Interacting only with a maid, never going out unchaperoned? Unable to work?”

“I’d take care of you.” He looks at her, more serious now, but with a small smile he says, “We might even be happy.”

She wants to believe him, she really does. But she thinks about his hand like a gun on her lower back.

She will have to willfully poke her own eyes out. Would it be worth it? For the safety, the comfort it would bring? Being taken care of by him. Not necessarily safe, but loved, at least. The truth is that she’s terrified to have him so close by now, and nothing to stand in between them any more. Nowhere to hide, for him or for her.

She imagines leaving Harlingen, leaving her house, her colleagues at the police station. Moving even further away from her family. Creating a dangerous, uncertain life for herself, willingly, just to gamble on the fact that they might ease each other’s loneliness, and find some form of happiness together. She’s thought about it before—moving away, turning over a new leaf. It’s always been quite easy for her to settle somewhere new by herself. But living together with him in some far-flung place, where the customs and the people are strange to her—she sees herself in the streets of Havana, Buenos Aires, Cartagena—and where he would be the only familiar thing… Looking at his imploring face, Kate thinks he’s not nearly familiar enough for all that.

But it’ll come in time. She just has to trust that it will.

He raises himself up again and puts his arm back around her waist. This time, she lets him. He kisses her cheek. “I was wrong when I said you couldn’t survive, in the land of wolves. You’ve got an appetite. You can make it.”

Unreassured, she accepts the caress and wonders why he is lying. Doesn’t he know by now she always bites off more than she can chew?

*

She makes fried eggs and tortillas for them in the morning, and strong coffee, while Alejandro sits down on the couch to watch CNN. They eat breakfast on the couch while watching the news.

“Twenty US border guards lost their lives last night in a shootout near the Mexican border at Laredo,” the news anchor says. “Those crossing the border were thought to be members of the Mexican Reyes cartel, attempting to extract the daughter of cartel boss Carlos Reyes, Isabel Reyes. Reyes was kidnapped by CIA operatives last month in what journalists have discovered was a hushed-up attempt by the CIA to play the Reyes and the Matamoros cartels against one another, one of the boldest moves made by the US government in the war on drugs thus far. The CIA has declined to comment at this time. Mattie Lopez has the latest…”

Open-mouthed, Kate stares at the photo of the beautiful young girl on the screen. There’s no doubt about it—it’s Carina, or (she feels foolish—of _course_ it wasn’t her real name) Isabel. She turns to Alejandro. 

“So that’s what ‘went south’. You started a war between the cartels? Are you two _fucking insane?_ ”

Alejandro says nothing. He has cleared his plate, and stands up to go to the kitchen. She follows him, shaking her head. “I can’t believe I used to think you two were the good guys. Well, looks like your chickens are coming home to roost. That poor girl,” she muses. She looks at his silent back, and feels a stab of resentment. _She was just a pawn to him. Like I was._

Her hunch had been right, that night. She should’ve kept Isabel in custody until she knew what was going on—but she’d been too blind, too frazzled, too…

“Is this what that phone call was about last night?”

He nods. “Matt has a plan. We’re gonna nip it in the bud.”

He says it with the same calm confidence he always displays, yet she can’t help but feel that something is off. That this time, they’ve really lost control.

“And then you’ll come back?”

He looks her in the eye for what feels like the first time today. He steps closer and cups her cheek with his hand.

“I will,” he says, earnestly, and kisses her.

She watches while he gathers his few belongings, anxiety pricking her skin. She thought it was fear she saw written on his face that night on the bus, and in the emergency room, but it’s not even close to what she sees in his eyes now. _For me,_ she thinks. _He’s afraid to lose me._ It makes her feel oddly triumphant, as if his fear anchors him to her, guarantees his return.

They kiss, more aggressively than ever before. She wraps her arms around him, wants to sink her nails into his shoulder blades, leave her mark, binding him to her.

“Be safe,” she says, muffled against his shoulder.

“You too.” He strokes her back with his fingers.

She watches from her balcony as he walks towards his car. He turns to look up at her. She forms a gun with her hand, squeezes one eye shut and aims it at him. “ _Pow_ ,” she says, pretending to fire. Even from this far away, she can see him smile. Then he turns, gets into the car, and drives off.

It’s that easy.

She goes back inside and sits down on the couch. The CNN anchor has moved on to the next segment about the civil war in Yemen. She feels empty; not used and discarded, like she did after Juaréz, but rather as if the centre has been torn out of her, leaving a great gaping hole.

It’s not like she’s without a purpose. There’ll be plenty of fallout from this incident; plenty of late-night patrols in the near future. _Could I really turn my back on all this?_ she wonders. _How can I be useful hiding out in some shithole in Mexico, or Colombia, or wherever?_

She gets up and starts putting the breakfast dishes in the dishwasher, feeling restless and ashamed when images from last night come back to her. How badly she wanted to uphold the illusion. What a fool she’s been for him. She wants to believe, so badly, that he will keep his promise. But can she reconcile herself with the idea that he will continue to do loathsome things, just because he no longer does them to her?

She knows more about him now, it’s true. But now that he has shown her all the myriad ways in which he has been damaged, made vulnerable, she still can’t quite shake the feeling of being in danger. Some part of her still thinks she could save him; it’s irresistible, having glimpsed this honesty in him, making her want to scramble over that wall. But of course, if his wife couldn’t, why should she be able to?

Once, she’d convinced herself he was a merciless killer, one set upon destroying her life. Well, he is—meaning, he has killed, and without mercy, no doubt—and he has—meaning, he has torn it up from the very roots, and she has let him—but he’s also saved her life, come to her for help, and offered her an escape from life as a sheep, mindlessly carrying out orders; given her a measure of control. She used to think him sparing her life was a cruelty, but now she knows it was an act of care.

It’s Sunday, and she doesn’t have to come in to work today. _Good._ She wants to sleep for a week. But she doesn’t see how she can stay here for the whole day, in this apartment which no longer feels entirely hers.

An idea strikes her.

Since she rarely calls in sick, she has a couple of leave days saved up. She calls the station to cash them in, then sits down at her computer to book a 4 p.m. flight to Laramie, Wyoming. Her parents will be pleased to see her, she knows, and she feels an overwhelming need to be among the familiar landscape: the prairies, the big sky, the mountains. The furthest thing from Mexico.

**II**

She’s right: her parents are delighted by her unexpected visit. When she walks into the arrivals hall, she immediately spots the tall, angular figure of her dad, a little balder every time she sees him. Tears spring up when she sees his sweet, warm face light up when he notices her in the crowd. They hug, and he sways her gently; she looks like shit, she knows it, but he doesn’t say anything, for which she’s grateful. He pulls back and takes her by her shoulders, studying her face, then reaches out to caress her cheek.

“Hi Katie.”

“Hi dad.”

“We’re so happy you’re here,” he says, picking up her suitcase and guiding her out of the terminal, speaking, as he usually does, for both himself and her mother. “How long are you staying?”

“A week. I fly back on Saturday.”

“Oh, good. Your mother’s been making a fuss—cleaning, baking… I’d hate to think all that was just for a weekend.”

Kate smiles wryly.

As he opens the trunk of his jeep to haul in her suitcase, she sits down in the passenger seat and buckles up. She notes, with surprise and unexpected delight, a dreamcatcher dangling from the rear view mirror—the one she made as a child on a school trip to the Wind River Indian reservation. How convinced she had been of its magical powers at the time, and how vividly she remembers wishing it would make her bad dreams go away. She smiles, feeling nostalgic for that childhood innocence. _Maybe I should take it with me back to Harlingen,_ she thinks.

It feels good to hug her mother, to sit down at the old kitchen table, to be in a house that is lived in and not just a collection of furniture, like hers is. When she was little she used to think her family home was haunted on account of the chorus of creaks and rattles that started up, like clockwork, around 11 pm every night—now she knows it was simply the various household appliances her parents only switched on at night to keep their electricity bill low. But no place seems warmer or more welcoming to her now. That is, until her mom starts talking.

Starving—her last meal was an airport sandwich, five hours earlier—Kate loads up her plate with her mom’s casserole and begins shovelling the food into her mouth. Her dad is talking, in his calm lecture-voice, about the drought and how they’ve just hired a new gardener because they can’t keep up with watering the garden. Kate hmms occasionally to show she’s listening; but it’s not until she catches a glimpse of her mother’s disapproving face in the reflective surface of the toaster that she stops chewing.

“It’s clear that you live alone,” her mom says, coldly, interrupting the monologue. “I don’t think we brought you up to wolf down your food like that.”

Kate lays down her fork, feeling the old vulture of shame circle around her for wanting something, having an appetite. Her mother’s like a broken record: never appear too eager, be satisfied with what you have, finish only what’s on your plate and don’t, for God’s sake, ask for more food. No wonder she’s still beating herself up for wanting too much, or for succumbing to the want when she thinks she should have resisted.

Normally, abiding by the unspoken rules in this house and too proud to let her mother draw her out, she’d back down. But something stops her from doing it now—a little seed of rebellion. She sticks another forkful in her mouth and simply says, “Take it as a compliment, mom. I’m enjoying the food.”

Her mother thins her lips, picks up her own fork, and resumes eating.

After a short pause, her dad says, “Anyway. Your mom can never remember his name. It’s Jorge, but she always calls him José.”

“That’s so embarrassing. Jesus.” Kate sighs. “It’s not that hard to pronounce. These are _people,_ working for their living, not your servants, or…”

Her mother puts her cutlery down with a clang. “I didn’t realise it was my turn to be pilloried tonight.”

“Nobody’s doing that, Grace,” her father says. To Kate, he says, “I know. Not everyone thinks the way you do, though. Sometimes I think you’re better than all of us.”

She turns back to her plate, feeling embarrassed. What is she supposed to say to that?

After a short silence, her mother begins again.

“We’re so glad you’ve left all this dangerous work with the FBI behind you, Katie,” says her mom. _“_ It was time you settled down, and started a quieter life.”

 _If only you knew how quiet my life has been for the past month._ This time, she bites her tongue and nods. Her mom has her best interests at heart, she knows, but their perspectives on life are so radically different that Kate knows that this is the only type of compliment she can expect.

Her mother took her divorce harder than she did, and ever since it seems to Kate that everything her mom says to her is ringed with pity. Pity for a failed marriage, for a lack of children, for her cigarette addiction, for her plain looks, for her life all gone wrong. _I don’t want your pity,_ Kate thinks now. _I don’t need it. There is a person out there who thinks the world of me._ It gives her a strange sensation of pride, as well as a secret delight, to think of Alejandro here, at the kitchen table, a sordid seam running through this tapestry of homeliness. She feels like an addict thinking about her next hit, and with the same shameful guilt.

Her mother, perhaps mistaking her silence for sadness, reaches out to stroke her hair. “We worry about you, you know,” she says.

“Why?” Kate bursts out. “Can’t I just come out here without you nagging me all the time?”

She has come here to look for comfort, but as always, she hates how invasive her mother gets, making assumptions about her life that make her look pathetic. She hates being made into a victim, as if she were incapable of making good decisions, as if everything she did were bound to go wrong from the start. She hates feeling like she has to make herself small enough to fit, feeling eternally hungry from an appetite that she’s not allowed to satisfy.

Her mother looks hurt, and Kate regrets her words instantly. Still, she resists the impulse to apologise. She has her boundaries too, and her mother has to learn. She’s not a little girl any more. (“You look like a little girl when you’re scared.”)

“Honey, I just want you to be happy,” her mother tries again.

“No, you want me to be like you,” Kate says. She’s tired, she’s dying for a cigarette and a drink, and she does not feel like being guilt-tripped by her mom right now.

“What do you mean by happiness, anyway?” _How can I be happy,_ she thinks, _in a world bursting with misery? A world populated by child killers, rapists, drug lords, assassins?_ But she knows the answer, too. The jokes she makes with her colleagues at the station. How she felt when he touched his fingers to hers as he exited the bus. When she knew he was going to live, coming out of the hospital. Last night, in his arms, in bed. Funny, she thinks, how joy, relief, happiness look different now; she never thought she’d associate these emotions with him.

“Well,” her mother says, “just… I’d like you to find someone who loves you, who treats you right.” She fidgets. “Just… I’d like you to be less lonely.”

 _So would I_ , she thinks, _but’s about time you learnt how the world works. How things that seem ugly and scary and sharp at first can wake you up, make you feel alive, give you pleasure you never even dreamed of. Finding someone who shares your strangeness is the real goal, not finding someone who pressures you to be normal, and doesn’t see you for who you really are. And I found one._

It lies on the tip of her tongue, her admission; she’d almost like to say it just to shock her mom, like the time when she was a teenager and she brought home a boy with five facial piercings, just to see her mom’s face.

She looks at her mother, and knows she will never have this realization. _I’m being unfair,_ she thinks. Yet she wonders how her mother would have turned out had she been in her place. If she hadn’t married such a mild-mannered man at such a young age; if she’d faced death on a daily basis, and had the scales torn off her eyes regarding her country’s foreign policies, and her soul overtaken by a misfit of a man.

She wonders if her mother ever envies _her._

“I’m sorry,” she tells her. “I’m a little wound up. It’s been a long day.”

Later that evening, lying in bed in her childhood bedroom, it occurs to her that the reason she’s lashing out is because, deep down, she’s scared to lose this. She can’t imagine what her life will be like if – _when_ – Alejandro returns. For the first time, she wonders how her parents will respond when she leaves with him. Surely she’ll still be able to contact them?

She hopes she can rise to the challenge; that she'll able to keep up with his lifestyle. It’s exhausting enough to be here and pretend everything is hunky-dory; what will it be like having to live undercover, maybe even under a false alias?

 _It’ll be easier_ , she reassures herself. Alejandro won’t want her to be small and pliable. He’ll offer her the room, the freedom, to be herself, even if she still doesn’t quite know who that is. She’ll be able to eat her fill of whatever he offers her, unrestrained by bosses, intermediaries, rules, laws to keep her from doing what she wants.

It’ll be an adventure. She feels the same excitement she used to when offered an even more daring, complicated mission than she’d ever been up against.

As she drifts off, she dreams about walking through the streets of Havana, images of bodies stuffed in plastic bags the furthest thing from her mind.

*

When she wakes up, she’s feeling magnanimous—the way you feel when you know there is somebody out there who loves you, and you feel like extending that love to other people because it seems selfish to keep it all to yourself. So, she decides, she’ll make amends with Reggie. She can’t deny that she misses him, after all.

Sitting on the porch with a cup of tea, she dials Reggie’s number. He picks up almost immediately, which surprises her.

“Kate?”

“Hi, yeah, it’s me.”

“What’s up?” He sounds breathless; maybe he’s at work, or else on his beloved treadmill.

“Uh… nothing, nothing serious. You have time to talk?”

“Yeah, sure.” She hears the beeps that signal he’s turning the treadmill off. It makes her smile.

“Just gimme a minute to put a clean shirt on.”

She hums her assent and sips her tea as she stares out at her mother’s garden. She lifts her hand to the gardener, who is at work clipping the rose bushes. He tips his hat with one dirty yellow glove.

“Okay, I’m here.” Reggie is back on the phone, and she feels her heart lift at just the sound of his voice.

“I just wondered how you are,” she begins. “I know I haven’t exactly been talkative for the past few… years.”

“You can say that again.”

“I was in a bad place,” she says. “I didn’t wanna burden you with all that shit. I was the only one who could get me out of it.”

He hums in agreement. “I figured. You got yourself into it, after all. Going down that tunnel.”

Her ego rears up in protest, briefly, but she coaxes it down again. No use beating a dead horse; what’s done is done. Actually, she finds his honesty refreshing; it makes her realize how much she’s missed him. “Yeah, well.”

“Don’t get me wrong, I get why you did it,” he says. “They set you up, those cowards, and then pretended you were at fault. The way I see it, you’re only guilty of following your curiosity, if not your gut.” He’s silent for a while. “But it’s a lesson, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” she says. He’s summed it up better than she’s ever been able to, even after three years of psychoanalysing herself.

“It was hard for me,” he says, “when you wouldn’t let me in. I mean, I still don’t even know what happened down there.”

“I told you,” she says. “They made me sign an agreement.”

“Yeah, but still…”

“Reggie,” she says, more firmly now. “It’s not that I don’t trust you with this information—you more than anyone else. But it’s too dangerous. If it _ever_ gets out, they’ll know I talked. They’ll know _you_ talked. They might come for our families, or…”

She hears him sigh. “All right. Forget I asked.”

“Thank you,” she says, and her voice trembles with emotion. She wishes so badly she _could_ tell him, extract this poisonous dart from within her and stop it festering, eating away at her sanity. She probably should, if she wants to gain back his trust. 

“But you’re over it now, right? Whatever it is that happened?”

 _That’s what they all want to hear,_ she thinks. _That I’m over it. That I won’t keep bringing it up and they won’t have to listen to it all again. They think it’s taken long enough. And they’re right. It has._

She exhales. “Yes. I am.”

“Good.” There is a beat of silence.

“And how are you?” she asks, forcing herself to sound chipper. “How’s life in Phoenix?”

Like her, Reggie resigned from the FBI after the events in Juaréz, claiming that if he was going to lose his partner, there was nothing keeping him there. He started work as a trainer at the police academy in Phoenix. He launches into a stand-up repertoire’s worth of jokes and stories about his time with the cadets.

“You could come back to Arizona,” Reggie suggests. “I could hook you up with a job, we could work together again. Be closer to your folks, too.”

She smiles. “But I’m happy in Texas. I like it there.”

“You’re not tired of rubbing elbows with cowboys?”

She laughs. “Not yet.”

“I get it. Maybe I’ll come visit you sometime.”

“That would be nice,” she says. “I have it on good authority that my couch is comfy.”

“I _see._ ” She can picture him wagging his eyebrows, and chuckles. “Not what you think, Reg.”

“All right. Well, I gotta go now, but I’ll hold you to that. Talk soon. And Kate?”

She tenses up, suspecting a trap.

“What?” she asks, guardedly.

“Thanks for checking in. I’m glad to hear you’re okay. Really.”

She breathes out a sigh of relief, and bites her lip to stem a flood of tears. “Me too. It was good talking to you.”

“Later.”

“Bye.”

She hangs up, and stares at the gardener’s bowed back rising up between the roses. Her tea has gone cold.

*

Despite their fight on the first night, her stay at her parents’ revives her. It does her good to see them go about their daily lives and join them for meals; it gives her a sense of normalcy and routine she realised she’d been missing. She and Reggie are texting regularly again. It makes her feel good to know he’s been waiting for her to come out of the wilderness, just as fierce and funny and protective of her as he’s always been, even if she feels, like she does around her parents, that she can’t be honest about her problems, because she already knows how they’ll respond.

There is actually something comforting about playing the role of her old self, escaping the invasive thoughts that she knows will swarm her again as soon as she gets home. Still, she knows she can’t keep presenting certain versions of herself to the world while throwing a tarp over less-than-pleasant aspects. Telling them the truth is simply not an option; they’d say she was being used and manipulated, and try to stop her from going. Any explanation she’d offer to the contrary, any nuance she’d suggest, would fall on deaf ears. But the more she pushes it away, the more she feels, rashly, like confessing to all of it. If they’ve already made up their mind to stigmatise her, she wants them to know that she’s not a victim, that it was her own choice to go through with all this. That would show them she wasn’t weak; that she’s earned the right to indulge her appetite, and eat herself to excess.

She’s been mulling it over, how to break it to them. But since she herself has no idea what the future will look like, or when she will actually leave, it’s difficult. At times, she feels as foolish as she did that morning after he left, and half convinces herself he won’t come back. There is an odd sense of relief that accompanies her in those moments. But then the old yearning returns, and she chastises herself for not trusting him when she should.

Eventually, the time comes for her to fly home. She arrives back in her apartment, dumps her suitcase in the living room and goes into the bedroom, where she collapses on her bed and presses the sheets to her nose, trying to catch some fleeting trace of his body, his smell, like they do in the movies. But there’s nothing. It’s almost as if he were never here.

**III**

Her nightmares are different now. Before, she dreamt about running and him chasing her down, terrified of what he could do. A dark figure, stalking her in her dreams, threatening to eat her up and destroy the only life she’d ever known. Now his nightmares have become hers. She stands beside him as he discovers the corpses of his daughter and wife. She dreams about lying immobile in the tunnel and it changes until she is lying on the desert floor, feeling the blood run warm down her cheeks; when she wakes, she can’t move, unable to suppress the feeling she is being watched, and if she just keeps very still she’ll be safe. She watches CNN more often than she used to, often putting it on in the background while she’s at home, just to hear the sound of voices. She can’t help but listen for his or Matt’s name to be dropped, proving that she hasn’t dreamed it all.

Habits are difficult to break. The habit of living, the habit of fear, and, most of all, the habit of love. She realizes she’s become addicted to his departures; how her heart starts ticking like a timer the moment he goes away from her, mixing anxiety and fear with hope. And despite her renewed friendship with Reggie, despite her love for her work, despite the little things that make her wonder whether life is so bad after all, she can’t help but feel how pointless it all seems; every day that passes just means the period between his departure and his return is growing ever longer. She soothes her nerves by telling herself she belongs somewhere now, even if it makes her anxious that she doesn’t know where it is yet, or when she’ll get there.

It starts become difficult to get out of bed in the morning. She doesn’t understand why telling herself to simply grit her teeth and buck up, the way she normally does, no longer works. Reggie, worried, cautions her against depression. Reluctantly, she calls her GP, who informs her it’s not unlikely, given her PTSD-diagnosis from a few years ago. She tells Kate mood swings, feelings of detachment from other people and unusual emotional outbursts are all symptoms.

“Have you been engaging in self-destructive behaviour?” she asks. “You know, like speeding, drugs, alcohol.”

“Nope,” says Kate.

“Why don’t you come in for a check-up,” the doctor says.

“It’s okay,” Kate says. _Why doesn’t he come,_ she wonders. _That’s what’s the real problem. And it can easily be fixed._

But he doesn’t come. The weeks turns into months, then years. First she prides herself on getting through the night, then the night and the day after, then the week. Eventually, she celebrates a whole month of keeping it together without panic attacks, nightmares or crying sessions. She searches vehicles on the border for familiar faces. She moves house, finding it impossible to feel at ease in a place that is so saturated with the memory of him. Twice she sleeps with men she meets at a bar, fulfilling a need, but each time she does she imagines it’s Alejandro in her bed. She goes on a date with a friend of Reggie’s, someone he served with in Afghanistan, and takes him back to her apartment only to find him cruel and violent in bed in a way she’d never have guessed from his outward appearance. He fucks her like he’s firing a machine gun, like he’s getting even with someone. Afterwards, the guy rolls off of her and promptly goes to sleep. She cries, as silently as possible.

When she tells Reggie, he apologises. “I had no idea he was like that. Sure, he got some damage, but who hasn’t, right? I thought it’d be okay, since you once said that someone who isn’t scarred is boring.”

“I never said that. I just said that people who haven’t seen the things we’ve seen, I find it hard to relate to them, much less go on a date with them. They all seem so small-town-America. The wool pulled over their eyes. And more often than not they think I’m a hysterical woman.”

“Well, that’s Texas for you.” She was annoyed that he didn’t take her seriously. _You’ll see,_ she thinks. _He’s gonna come back for me, and I’m gonna live the life none of you think I can handle. In the land of wolves._

But the more often she says it to herself, the more foolish it seems, and the more scared she is that she was right to feel paranoid after all.

(“You look like a little girl when you’re scared.”)

*

She’s lying in bed, one Texan winter’s night, and dreams she’s in the desert. Aside from a single cactus sporting a red flower and some rocks, there is nothing to be seen in either direction, just the white-hot line of the horizon that trembles in the heat. No—wait. A small pile of what looks like sticks rises up from the desert floor in the distance. She walks towards it. When she comes near, she sees they’re not sticks, but bones, and freezes.

Are they his bones? Is this another one of her nightmares where she has watched him die, felt what it was like to be him as he lay there, and these his bones, picked clean by animals, dried and bleached in the unforgiving desert sun?

No. She knows, somehow, that this is no place on earth. It’s the no man’s land between sleeping and waking, life and death, both of which she knows pretty intimately by now. A place where much more happens underground than on the sparse, deserted surface. A land of apparitions, miracles, hauntings, healings. A land of snakes, scorpions, birds of prey. A land of wolves.

She picks up one of the bones, blowing the sand off of it, and it trembles in her hand like living thing. Suddenly, she feels very strongly—a tingling feeling somewhere in her body—that it’s her own. She’s holding her own bones.

A voice, a beautiful, melodic voice, says, “Find yourself, Kate. Every last piece.”

She wakes with a start, drenched in sweat. Her room is still dark. Exhausted, she sits up and switches on the reading light. Her phone says 4:06 a.m. She looks down at her hand, still feeling the imprint of the smooth white bone on her palm.

Sitting down on the couch, she turns on the news. A headline jumps out at her: CARTEL BOSS FOUND MURDERED IN JUARÉZ. Her heart racing, she turns up the volume.

The news anchor says: “Carlos Reyes, the infamous leader of the Reyes cartel, was found murdered this morning in a warehouse in Valle Hermoso, close to the northeast Texas border. The elusive Reyes created the cartel in 1993. Reyes’s murder is likely to send shockwaves through the cartel world, as the location of the body, firmly in the territory of the Matamoros cartel, and the absence of a likely suspect may prompt uncontrolled bursts of revenge-motivated violence.”

Kate sits in stunned silence. In that moment, she knows what she really knew all along.

He’s not coming.

Did she honestly believe he’d changed because of her? Did she really think he would settle for a quiet life with her, put out to pasture in suburbia in some ant hill of a city?

How could she have ignored her instincts for so long?

She sits there, dumbly, staring at the images on the screen without seeing them. But what she feels is not, to her surprise, the sadness, the anxiety she used to feel when he left her before. What she feels is anger.

(“You are not a wolf. And this is the land of wolves now.”)

The land of wolves. Where things are, and are yet to be. She’s been living in this land for the past few years, fantasizing about something that was to be but never became and will now never happen. And it’s always been that way with him. Even when he was honest about himself she couldn’t see him for who he truly was. The land of wolves is where he resides, where reality and fantasy become blurred. He gave her an identity, yet hadn’t said what that made him; she’d filled in the blanks herself.

She sees now how she has lived, thinking she had to stay underground, keep her desires under the surface because life above-ground was too harsh, too unforgiving. In some ways she’s never left that tunnel in Nogales, in some ways she’s still lying there staring up at the ceiling, trying hard to catch her breath, remembering the look in his eyes as even more breathtaking than the bullet that struck her.

She thinks of the pile of bones in her dreams. There are pieces of her still there, in Mexico, scattered, embedded in its soil, taken by him on his way to God knows where. Perhaps she should go and look for them.

She rubs her hands over her face and stands up to go make coffee. There’s no way she’s going back to sleep now. Mug in hand, she sits down and turns on her computer. She has an email from Reggie, and clicks on it.

“Hey Kate,” it says. “I have a proposal for you. My brother’s getting married to his Mexican wife next month, so I’m driving down from Phoenix to Tijuana. I was wondering if you wanted to come with me. Not as my date, that would be _weird,_ but just as a friend. We can make a fun weekend of it, hang out on the beach, trying to forget some of the bad memories you made in Mexico. What do you think? I feel like you could use a vacation. Let me know. Reg x”

She sits staring at the screen, in awe of the serendipity of the moment. To go back to Mexico, but not alone; to make new memories in the place that has haunted her for the past few years; to try and recover what she’s lost. It would be like turning on the light, and showing up the figure that looked like a man in the dark for what it is—a coat stand. She immediately pictures how fun it would be—like old times. Drinking margueritas. Hanging out with Reggie’s family. She’s met his brother once, at some FBI thing. She’ll be safe, and with Reggie, and nothing will happen, and she’ll be able to exorcise some bad memories.

She starts typing a reply.

**Author's Note:**

> Stay tuned for part four - the final chapter :-)


End file.
